Data warehousing is often used for reporting and analysis within organizations. Within data warehousing, reporting and analysis tools exist that operate against organization data copied from a transaction data environment into a data warehouse, which is a separate instance of organization data, which is essentially out of date once it is copied. Therefore, the reporting and analysis performed against a data warehouse instance can only be considered historic and is certainly not real time. Further, the copying of data from the transaction data environment to the data warehouse is a time consuming and computing-resource intensive process.
More recent data warehousing solutions allow for conventional data warehousing reporting and analysis to be performed directly against data in the transaction environment. Such solutions may rely on interfaces that map between data elements needed by data warehouse reporting and analysis tools and data elements in a transaction data environment. To date, these mappings have been custom developed by advanced users having knowledge of data warehouse reporting and analysis tools and their data requirements and data in the transactional data environment.